[Events] bringing your own wireless

[Catherine Devlin]

Hi, everybody,

I'm looking for a good location for the Dayton Python Workshop, and
there's a spot that's ideal in almost every way except for one glaring
failure: I can't trust its wireless.  In fact, I have been hideously
betrayed by its wireless once before - while I was teaching a Python
introduction - leaving 3/4 of the class unable to participate in what
was supposed to be a hands-on workshop and forcing me to improvise a
traditional eyes-forward lecture instead.  I still have nightmares.

So does anybody know if there's a way to essentially bring in just
enough internet to do the workshop?  I'm unfortunately not an
experienced network person and don't even know the right jargon to ask
the question in, but could I host a CodingBat server on my own machine
and let attendees connect directly to it there, whether the wider
internet is available or not?

I've also wondered whether an IPython Notebook could be created that
could duplicate what CodingBat does.  That, then, could be distributed
by USB along with the Python installer, etc.

If it's a lot of work, I could go to other locations, but I really
like this one (a large community college) because, unlike most tech
sites around Dayton, it's not buried deep in the whites-only suburbs;
also, the CIS department chair has always been enthusiastic to get
involved with everything I suggest.  I'm frankly afraid to tell her
about the workshop if we don't end up running it there, because she'll
be so disappointed.  :)

Incidentally, have we ever developed an easy way to clone a workshop's
wiki pages and get all the internal links changed accordingly?  In
Indianapolis, I missed a bunch of links, so attendees sometimes
accidentally wandered from the Indianapolis pages to Boston.  If we're
still doing it by hand, maybe I can figure out a way to script it...

Thanks!
-- 
- Catherine
http://catherinedevlin.blogspot.com